Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Braxton's Lear - Drunkards - Is There ANYTHING They Don't Know?

Slate's combination Village Atheist/Town Drunk launches another wobbly salvo at Sarah Palin, triggered by her refusal to actually touch the floor with her forehead when Science passed by in all His majesty. The causus belli was actually a little less lofty; as Yuval Levin pointed out in National Review Online, Palin was criticizing the method of funding of this particular piece of scientific research; a sneaky little earmark slipped in by the Democratic Representative for California. In other words, dirty porkbarrel politics as usual. Obviously not a matter of outrage for an Obama supporter like Hitchens, who has spent most of his life siding with Marxist thieves and con artists and is clearly enjoying his return to familiar territory.

But instead of honestly admitting that he supports grabbing taxpayer dollars through any con that will work, he tries to take some bogus atheist high road, which turns out to be just a handy excuse for screaming abuse at a woman.

In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level,

Let's start out with an assertion of our own lofty claims to high culture, shall we? Hitchens steps down from the rarified cultural atmosphere to which he is accustomed, to deliver a lesson in manners from the land of yobbos and soccer hooligans, to the vulgarians of the New World. Wisdom! Attend.

with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit,

Gosh, isn't that like Christopher Hitchens claiming that he can combine increased alcohol consumption with a reduction in barfing in doorways? The halfway alert reader might notice that he's the one responsible for the problem at BOTH ends. Instead, he talks as if the "staggering new levels of federal deficit" are some natural phenomenon like increased tornado activity in Kansas, which simply have to be accepted as part of The Way Things Are.

and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn't seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber.

This is where the Great Tragedian smites his forehead and declaims, 'Would to Gud I'd been lain in my grave ere I lived to see such a day!" But Hitchens has sort of messed up the "Would to Gud" line, so he'll have to just flounce offstage in a sulk at the indignity of having to lower himself to actually notice a plumber - a PLUMBER, forsooth!

But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy "I kid you not."

Hey, Hitchens, you might try that folksy business sometime. The only reason people in Mayberry put up with a character like Otis the Town Drunk is because he's so darned cheerful and polite. If he were always belching booze fumes in people's faces and spitting on their shoes, they'd probably belt him in the teeth and throw him out of town.

I won't bore you with the canned biology lesson on the fruit fly that follows next, you can probably read it in Wikipedia for yourself. Though I was interested to discover that "fruit fly" is also gay slang for a woman who hangs around homosexuals. Maybe Sarah Palin was just objecting to research on the Episcopal Church?

Hitchens tosses off the science lesson quickly, in order to get to what he REALLY wants to write about: Palin's obnoxious insistence upon being a Christian.

With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be something a little more sinister than the bluff, empty-headed plain-man's philistinism of McCain. We never get a chance to ask her in detail about these things,

What? Mrs. Palin isn't granting interviews to you? Dear, oh dear! What is an honest, fair-minded journalist with an interest in widening his horizons and a curiosity about other people's beliefs to do? I guess he could take all that free time that he intended to devote to interviewing Mrs. Palin and use it to ask probing, in-depth questions of Barack Obama. I've no doubt he'd be happy to answer questions about all the interesting people he's met since his his college days and the economists and political players who have most influenced him and why. Oh, he's not granting interviews, either? Fancy that.

but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools (smuggling this crazy idea through customs in the innocent disguise of "teaching the argument," as if there was an argument), and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now....

An article by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times gives further gruesome details of the extreme Pentecostalism with which Palin has been associated in the past (perhaps moderating herself, at least in public, as a political career became more attractive).

On the other hand, he could just make up a lot of vapourous assumptions and insinuiations and string them together in a vaguely threatening mass, then strike a dramatic pose as the Clarence Darrow of our day, declaim thunderously about sloth, envy, wickedness and stupidity, and wait for the applause as the curtain falls.

1 Comments:

I just don't get it. These people go on about Gov. Palin having been part of a classical-Pentecostal church (which denomination does tend to highly regard both common sense and personal integrity) while endorsing by default the obscene rantings of the pastor of one of a church which seems ignorant of them both, and that "pastor" having played a key part in Obama's life for twenty years.

Interesting that the idea of a Designer behind all this grand design is seen as a fairy story (Though Prof. Dawkins is now open to the possibility of space aliens behind it all...), but the current "Liberal" nope, Socialist follower seems to have followed the standard "remove brain, insert ideology" procedure to get a membership card.

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I'm a married lady with 3 kids, all at different spots on the autism spectrum. In my spare time I translate and create English subtitles for obscure French movies. I also bake, garden and build computers.